Critic speak is tough, but we've got you covered.
Quote :The Birth of the Clinic
The clinic—constantly praised for its empiricism, the modesty of its attention, and the care with which it silently lets things surface to the observing gaze without disturbing them with discourse—owes its real importance to the fact that it is a reorganization in depth, not only of medical discourse, but of the very possibility of a discourse about disease.
It ain't about the body, folks. It's about the words.
Basically, what Monsieur is telling us here is that the clinic (the doctor's office) is built around the idea that the patient's body is doing the talking, and the doctor is only an objective observer. The doctor uses his expert training to spot the signs of disease or disorder in the patient's body and then he objectively translates these signs into a diagnosis and a treatment plan.
But this process of observation followed by clinical translation into the language of disease (diagnosis) and treatment (prognosis and medical intervention), according to the clinical model, is built, according to Foucault, around a false idea that clinical medicine is entirely free of judgment and motivation.
According to this model, clinical observation and practice is entirely true and accurate—an innocent representation of the signs the body shows of its disease or disorder.
But, the truth, Foucault tells us here, is that this process of clinical observation, diagnosis, and treatment is not at all judgment-free and it is in no way an objective representation of an indisputable reality. In fact, clinical medicine is built entirely around a language of disease, a language that describes what the disease looks like, how it behaves, and what should be done to treat it.
The doctor, instead of letting the body "talk" and objectively identifying the signs the body gives, is in fact guided by the language of disease that his medical training teaches him. He finds in the patient's body what his language teaches him to look for so that he can then treat the body in the way that clinical medicine teaches him to treat the body.
So, instead of the patient's body guiding the way that the body is treated and talked about, it is instead the language of medicine that guides the way that the patient's body is treated and talked about. The doctor is not the objective observer who lets the body's signs of illness speak for themselves but instead he is the expert user of medical language who uses medical discourse to define how the patient's body is perceived, understood, and treated.
And why? So that clinical medicine can use the language of disease—of diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment—to shape how we understand bodies and ourselves.
In a nutshell, Foucault is telling us here that clinical medicine's new way of understanding and talking about disease is really just a means to ensure that we all have the same ideas about how bodies are supposed to look, function, and behave.
And anything that falls too far outside of that idea of "normal" functioning is thought of as pathological or "diseased," in the language and ideology of clinical medicine.